I.  Pinch of movie background

  A.  Helena enters dreamworld she created involuntary.

  B.  Switched by princess- wants to experience realworld.

  C.  Captured and brought to evil queen.

II.  Helena's Transformation

  A.  Robot maids

    1.  Lull Helena into trance with song

    2.  They don't have feet- stay in boxes

  B.  Helena to princess

    1.  Very subtle and smooth

    2.  End result is dramatic

    3.  Helena doesn't get a mask

III.  Movie observations

  A.  Normal/Abnormal comparision

    1.  Bodies (dreamworld vs. realworld)

    2.  Atmosphere (dreamworld vs. realworld)

  B.  Masks

    1. Everyone in dreamworld has one- normal

    2. Everyone in realworld has no masks- normal

      a)  Circus Masks

      b)  Valentine's jokes

  C.  Overall critique

    1.  Great CG effects

    2.  Enjoyable to watch/ mesmerized 

Olivia D. Laurel

Julia Zay

Fashioning the Body

2 November 2007

Andy Warhol’s Most Wanted Men

Andy Warhol created the mural ‘The 13 Most Wanted Men’ for the New York City World’s Fair in 1964.  He could have stuck to making a mural of Campbell’s soup labels, but instead he used his artwork as an agency to make a political statement. This political statement however was made up of many different components. I feel he wasn’t trying to make just one bold statement; he was speaking to his audience on various different levels of politics.  I would like to share each observation I found to show his possible motives for this particular art piece, and in doing that I have decided to use the texts of Michel Foucault and Mary Douglas to support my thoughts and ideas in this matter.

            Looking at his past art pieces like Electric Chair, Green Burning Car, and 129 Die in Jet, to name a few, he loved shock value in his work (Sanders 35-38).  He seemed to be driven through tragedy.  This behavior might have been sparked when his father passed away from peritonitis when he was a young boy in 1941(Greenberg 12).  It was tradition in the church for his family to hold a wake for three days in the home.  Having the dead body of his father lay in the house devastated him so much that he would refuse to come out of his room and would hide underneath the bed until the wake was over (11).  Years

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later as an adult, when President Kennedy was shot and killed in 1963, he was inspired to do a whole series on  Jackie Kennedy called ‘Twelve Jackies’ with photographs showing 

the expressions on her face coping with the trauma of her husband’s death (Sanders 126).  Warhol did the same thing when Marilyn Monroe died.  He was motivated through tragedy and as a result it created shock value to his art.  The tragedies portrayed stirred up many emotions within his audience on each of his art pieces.  ‘The 13 Most Wanted Men’ stirred up anger amongst the World’s Fair officials because Warhol was instructed to take the mural down within 24 hours from when it was put up on the state building.  His reaction to this rejection was quite rebellious and gutsy because he proposed that he substituted the criminals’ faces to a repetition of ferociously smiling faces of the World’s Fair president Robert Moses who made the decision to take the mural down (Greenberg 70).  He was rejected with this idea as well.  So the mural was just covered in silver paint.

Mary Douglas writes in her book The Two Bodies, “The human body is always treated as an image of society and …there can be no natural way of considering the body that does not involves at the same time a social dimension” (79).  Every person creates an image to society, and when Andy Warhol used criminals in this mural, it created a shocking reality of what an image could look like amongst the people of New York City.  Most of these men were murderers from New York and from an Italian descent.  As we know, at this time in history, there were many Italians coming to America, and there was a big rise in crime associated with the Mafia. When Warhol showcased these wanted men on a 20x20 foot mural and grouped them together as a collective, it created a whole new

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meaning of what social dimension can look like.  They were each labeled a criminal before the mural existed, but coming together as ‘The 13 Most Wanted Men’ gave this

piece so much more power for his audience to see.  It was as if he multiplied the fear 13 fold, and created a new gang of power.

Andy Warhol also took the time to invest in these bodies and placed them strategically on the mural.  He clumped them together, left spaces, and also used patterns with it.  He turned these men into objects of knowledge.  Michel Foucault states in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, “One would be concerned with the ‘body politic’, as a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communication routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge” (102).  Warhol used these bodies as tools to display knowledge of a harsh reality.  With this utility, he was able to communicate to his audience how his art became strong by mere arrangement.  The statement he was trying to convey was always left for the viewer to decide; Warhol was never very clear with his artwork.  He said it himself, “Artists are never intellectuals, that’s why their artists” (Greenberg 16).  As an artist, it was part of his individual being to create a whirlwind of thoughts for his audience to mull over.  Having that freedom and power to speak to his audience on this level must have been quite gratifying to Warhol throughout his art career.

So what does a criminal look like?  Foucault writes an example regarding soldiers and about how “the soldier has become something that can be made; out of formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a

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calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit; in short, one has ‘got rid of the peasant’ and give him ‘heir of a soldier’” (102).  Andy Warhol uses these wanted men as formless clay to make his shocking statements.  But before Warhol shaped them, the criminals formed themselves first.  These criminals were not born criminals, they made themselves who they were by the choices they made in there own individual lives.  So these men were formed by themselves to begin with, and when Warhol molded them together it created a much stronger meaning.

There is also the factor that Andy Warhol was a homosexual and how his lifestyle was portrayed in society at that time.  I see a connection that he might have made personally with these men because they were labeled as criminals for their crimes which automatically moved them into being categorized as outcasts within the public.  Maybe Warhol was also feeling somewhat of an outcast with his homosexuality and projected his personal feelings on to these men in the mural.  I think it’s so easy to deny the cruel reality of a crime, and most people prefer to sugar coat the truth when they do try to actually face it.  I believe that homosexuality was taken in the same manner; it was out there but people didn’t want to talk about it or accept it as a lifestyle.  Lynne Tillman writes in her essay Like Rockets and Television II about how “Most Wanted Men’s other provocation is sexual, challenging the state with an outlawed, unspeakable love, homosexuality.  …Warhol, queer-American, gives new meaning to the phrase ‘self-made man’.  A self made into any man, bad, good, as random an end as the flip of that coin” (Tillman 147).  That flip of the coin, was that of a silvered destiny that was created with

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these criminals to show the various facets of how institution can shape images in societies by events that take place.  Warhol changed the status of these criminals into somewhat of a celebrity status when he showcased them in this mural.  These mug shots were meant to portray obscenity within the state, but Warhol shaped the photographs to expose knowledge and truth about the different lifestyles that amongst societies.

To conclude my thoughts, Andy Warhol’s mural of ‘The 13 Most Wanted Men’ opened up many layers of politics for the people of New York City to see.  I talked about how Warhol was motivated through tragedy to do his artwork, and he loved to expose a reality that shocked the public.  When he used the criminals to create social dimension, he used labels, categories, and status these men carried on their own.  Warhol also did his own shaping of these images to create a new interpretation to the mug shots.  The way he grouped and arranged the photographs brought on more power to the mural.  Even the projection of his personal life brought on a new level of meaning to the mural.

Though Andy Warhol laid all these aspects within his artwork for the viewers to see, he left the mural subjective for his audience to make their own conclusions.  In doing that, he succeeded in created shock value in this mural to stir up his audience and get them to start talking about their own political perspectives regarding ‘The 13 Most Wanted Men’.

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WORKS CITED

Douglas, Mary.  The Two Bodies.  London and New York: Routledge, 1996 (1970).

Foucault, Michel.  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison.  New York : Random

      House, 1979.

Greenberg, Jan, and Sandra Jordan.  Andy Warhol: Prince of Pop.  New York: Delacorte

      Press, 2004.

Sanders, Edward, Ernst Beyeler, Georg Frei, and Peter Gidal.  Andy Warhol: Series and

      Singles. Germany: Yale University Press, 2000.

Tillman, Lynne.  “Like Rockets and Television II.”  Who is Andy Warhol.  Pittsburg,

      Pennsylvania: The Andy Warhol Museum, 1997.

I am:

-very organized

-a team player

-open to new ideas

-a very creative person

I would love to hook up with people who have the same qualities and are interested in a similar study.  If this sounds like you, please get in touch with me.  I would love to talk to you.

THANKS 

Olivia

Fashioning the Body

10/12/07

Concept Rhyming Essay #1

1)                  Information and skills gained through experience or education.

2)                  The total of what is known.

3)                  Awareness gained by experience of a fact or situation.

The Oxford English Dictionary states it pretty clear on what the word knowledge

 means, but does it compare with Foucault’s definition of the term?  Before we start to analyze and break down what knowledge meant to him in this book, we need to first gain an understanding of where he was personally during this time frame. 

Foucault, a well known philosopher in his day, wrote numerous books before ‘The History if Sexuality’.  He had written about insanity, clinics, prisons, human sciences, and so on.  In all of his books, you can see how his mind was working to unravel all the reasons behind the behaviors of where people were coming from.  But, when he sat down to write about sexuality, I believed he poured his heart into the words as well as his brain.  As a homosexual in the mid-twentieth century, times were rough.  He had to endure criticism and judgment from all angles of society, and this type of behavior had gone on for many centuries before his lifetime.  They told him he was a freak, and that being attracted to the same sex only meant that he had a serious illness.  Disturbed by this constant attack from people, his brain started spinning a web of ideas based upon the knowledge of what was out publicly from other philosophers, what was

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considered normal in society, and finally of his own ideas and experiences he had cultivated within his life about sexuality.

            The word knowledge is abundantly splashed all over his book, but he refers to this word in a lot of different contexts.  In my essay, I will be addressing the top two phrases that he wrote about the most. The first phrase that was most commonly used was ‘the will to knowledge’.  Compared to all the other phrases, that one was written down eight times.  Why did he want to make such an emphasis about the will?  On pages eleven and twelve he writes, “And finally, the essential aim will not be to determine whether these discursive productions and these effects of power lead one to formulate the truth about sex, on the contrary falsehoods designed to conceal that truth, but rather to bring out the ‘will to knowledge’ that serves as both their support and their instrument”.  Here, he is writing about exposing essential facts on sexuality to everyone- regardless if it shocking.  And now that it had been revealed, he leaves it for the reader to decide what to think.  I love that about Foucault!  You know exactly where the man stands, but he puts the choices on a plate for you to decide.  He doesn’t condemn the facts, he is simply exposing it with what he has collected, which then puts his own spin on it to confess that thinking about sex in different ways is not necessarily taboo.  And not only does he lays all the facts open for the reader to formulate their own thoughts, he goes on to write that because of this new knowledge of sexuality, it can become more powerful as an tool because we all know about it now. 

Comparing how he has used his definition of the term in his book from the definition of the Oxford dictionary, I think he stayed on the same mindset.  His point to

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the reader was to bring a new awareness about sexuality.  It was only when he put ‘will to’ in front of the word for the reader to give that choice for them to accept this new knowledge or not.

            Foucault also enjoyed clumping the words knowledge and power together to make one hyphenated word.  By doing this he was able to show that knowledge and power shared equal importance of strength. And by linking them together made the term even stronger than if they were each on their own   The two accounts of ‘knowledge-power’ in the book were written when he was discussing his thoughts upon the confession within the church and courtroom.  From the time of the Victorian era, people were very reserved to say they enjoyed sex, let alone even talking about it.  You were thought to be a pervert if you had any of these feelings, and sharing them would only bring exploitation of you within society.  He wanted to emphasize that making a confession has its advantages and disadvantages- a double edged sword if you will. 

There can be high risk involved when you admit your innermost feelings and desires with a person- especially if it someone who has authority within the church or judiciary.  On one hand, letting the truth be known can actually bring normality amongst communities if enough people came out and share their similar feelings on sexuality.  On the other hand, if it wasn’t considered ok, there could be high costs for the confession.  Authorities could deem you sick or insane which then could lead you to be the object of scientific study for the rest of your life.  By confessing his own sexual desires, Foucault was influencing power to the knowledge he was writing about.  So when he was writing about knowledge-power, he was wanted to show the reader that they can have this same

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strength with their own confessions.  This pattern could then potentially start to reshape what is determined normal within societies.  When I again compare his term of knowledge to the one in the dictionary, I still see the same definition.  He just made it stronger when he hyphenated the word to emphasize his point.

Foucault took special care in writing ‘The History of Sexuality’.  It not only involved the thoughts that were stewing about in his mind, but it also involved his heart to put feeling into the book.  When he combined both heart and mind, his term of knowledge became much more powerful than by just writing from the knowledge only in his head.  The term knowledge in itself carries the meat for the definition, but when Foucault added his phrasing of the term, it was like adding vitamins to the meat for that extra boost of nutrition.

In conclusion, because Foucault brought his own personal desires to the book as well as the knowledge he collected, he was able to execute his theory with success.  It may have shaken up the thoughts within the reader’s mind, but all in all, he brought his debate to the surface in the hopes of other people standing up and speaking out about their own beliefs.                   

Take this quiz to find out...

PRINT FULL NAME___________________________________

1.  Are you a) male b) female c) other

2. What is your race?  a) white b) black c) other

3.  What is your year of birth?  a) 1900-1930 b) 1931-1970 c) other

4.  What is your marital status?  a) married b) divorced c) other

ANSWER KEY

1.  A) 2 B) 3 C) 5

2.  A) 3 B) 2 C) 5

3.  A) 5 B) 2 C) 3

4.  A) 3 B) 5 C) 2

 SCORE:

8-12

You are on top of your game!  You are well on your way to a successful life of normallity in the United States. 

4-7

Your are currently in the middle of the road, but don't give up!  The light of normalness is definitely in view!

1-3

What the heck are you doing here?!  You don't really belong here!  You need to seriously rethink your future goals.